Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai (2011)

by Walter Chaw Masaki Kobayashi's 1962 masterpiece Harakiri is the height
of austere--almost Noh--Japanese filmmaking. It lands somewhere between Ozu's
pillow flicks and Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, and, of course, as Kobayashi
is the auteur behind the Human Condition trilogy, that martial
austerity, that antiestablishment mien, is to be expected, if impossible to ever
truly gird oneself against. It's set in 1630, at the end of feudal Japan,
when collapsing fiefdoms mean throngs of ronin overflowing into the
countryside and, occasionally, asking for the right to commit ritual suicide in
an "honourable" courtyard. Tsugumo is one such samurai, but before
he's granted the privilege of dragging a sword across his belly, House of Iyi counsellor
Saito insists on telling him of a previous penitent, Chijiiwa, who claimed he
wanted to kill himself but only really wanted a handout. Seeking to make an
example of Chijiiwa and the effrontery he represents to the Bushido code, the
Iyi clan decides to force the issue--even after it's revealed that Chijiiwa
has, somewhere along the way, pawned his iron for a bamboo stick with a hilt.
It's a kind of torture, and everyone watches. Kobayashi goes into flashback,
unexpectedly, telling the story of the young samurai we, at first, are
complicit in mocking. We participate in his torture. We believe he
deserves it. By the end of the film, we don't believe that anymore.

Takashi Miike's remake, Hara-Kiri: Death
of a Samurai (hereafter Hara-Kiri), marks the second time that
Japan's enfant terrible has gone to his culture's formalist well after
remaking Eiichi Kudo's The Thirteen Samurai (1963) via the astonishingly
good 13 Assassins. It follows the same plot, though the first time
through I was disappointed with the ways in which Miike changed the Kobayashi,
providing too much exposition here or too little there. In any case, I thought
the central reveal happened much too early. But then I understood: Miike's film is set a few years after Kobayashi's; it trades in a different
kind of realism altogether, earning its austerity in a different way. Tsugumo
(Ebizo Ichikawa) this time around is clearly the avenging angel from the
beginning--there is an expectation attached to this filmmaker and enough of a
familiarity with the original (one presupposes) that the only point of a remake
would be to not attack the hypocrisy of the feudal structure, but to challenge
those expectations. Hara-Kiri isn't about the lies that institutions
tell, nor is it about how the trials of the little man are nothing but a hill
of beans in the grand scheme of things. Rather, Hara-Kiri is about how
Miike is engaged now in commenting on the traditions of his nation's cinema.
It's not much different from what Tarantino does with the western genre.

Consider the moment where Tsugumo reveals that he's humbled the clan's
three best swordsmen, and consider that while Kobayashi chooses to keep Saito
unaware that he's on a hook before the fisherman sets and reels,
Miike chooses to jump immediately to the end. Consider, especially, how this Hara-Kiri
has Tsugumo enact his ultimate act of vengeance with a bamboo sword instead of
a metal one...and how that changes everything. Hara-Kiri is
quintessentially post-modern. It has no meaning without knowledge of the
original and Miike's other films; its message, if there is one, is that there's
no such thing anymore as a meaningful proto-narrative--post-modernism has
become the only lens through which we view anything. The picture suggests, above all
else, that it's impossible to approach anything with a clean perspective. Ultimately, the only recourse is to come to welcome Pyrrhic victories as at
least personal victories. Hara-Kiri is beautiful, brilliant, the product
of a wildly prolific filmmaker who occasionally slips a movie past the
guardians of our culture here in the West by dressing up genre fare as
prestige (13 Assassins). Now he's made a movie that looks like a traditional
samurai flick but actually challenges an entire tradition of samurai cinema. It's
not about Bushido, it's about its representation. And it's awesome.